Sarah: The video was actually shelved for many months because of the writers’ strike. We dusted it off and aired it on Jimmy’s five-year-anniversary show instead. I remember that night: Jimmy and I were brushing our teeth before the show, and he was like, “I’m so excited for your surprise—I hear it’s great!” I didn’t want him to psych himself up too much, so I was like, “It’s a ‘funny video,’ you know?” Jimmy loved it, which was nice.
Matt: After the thing ran, I went to pick Alexia up at school, and one of the teachers came out and had seen it and said, “Oh, it was great, it was really good,” and then I realized, “Okay, it’s okay.”
Sarah: The fact that it became this viral thing was very unexpected. It’s funny—though our names will forever be linked, I really don’t know him personally. I mean, if I see him somewhere, he gives me a warm hug and hello, but I don’t have his phone number or anything.
Apparently, Damon doesn’t just collect famous friends. Which makes sense, since his relationship with his own celebrity has been fraught. While he understands that profiles like this one play a part in marketing his films, he has at times been difficult when interviewers have tried to talk about anything more personal than global politics or film theory. The last time this magazine profiled him, in 2007, the writer resorted to describing the “excruciatingly long and loud—like, racehorse long-and-loud—piss” he took in a trailer lavatory, because “it was the most interesting thing he did over the course of…three hours.”
Crowe has a theory about Damon’s elusiveness. “Matt’s a guy who skewers pretension. Hourly and by the minute, nothing is going to get pumped up into some lofty thing with Matt around,” the director says. “It may not be as subversive as him trying to be tricky about not letting the interviewer get to him. It’s more that he would skewer the guy that you mostly read in celebrity interviews. He laughs at that guy. He’s very careful to not be that guy.”
With me, he hasn’t been that guy. He’s been forthcoming—way more forthcoming, he already realizes, than he meant to be. Damon has very pointedly skewered someone—Gilroy—who he feels unfairly pumped himself up. And he regrets it. As this story is going to press, he’ll call me to clarify: “If I didn’t respect him and appreciate his talent, then I really wouldn’t have cared…. My feelings were hurt. That’s all. And that’s exactly why I shouldn’t have said anything. This is between me and him. So saying anything publicly is fucking stupid and unprofessional and just kind of douchey of me.”
But that will come later. Now, at the zoo, his phone buzzes—his wife again. It’s time to pick up their daughters from school, so Damon, his dad, and I head for the exit. There we meet up with Lucy, and we all walk briskly east, toward a huge chauffeured black Yukon XL that waits to whisk them away. Before we can get to it, though, a paparazzo suddenly charges toward us, his camera raised. He’s not exactly menacing, but he’s persistent, trying to herd Damon and his family into a single frame. Most movie stars of Damon’s stature would have said, “This isn’t funny—put a chain on that thing!” But Damon smiles a tight smile. “Here,” he says politely, “you can take a shot of me and my pop.” Damon stays in. You see him flinch, but he stays in.
Amy Wallace is a GQ correspondent.
